Facebook Audience Optimization for Organic Posts

The declining reach of posts has been an issue for page owners on Facebook with organic posts reaching fewer and fewer of its intended audience without a paid ad. It appears that our cries have been heard and the tech giant has rolled out the Facebook Audience Optimization Tool for organic posts which is designed to helps page owners better determine the groups of people with which to engage and in what ways.

To get started, if your page has 5,000 or more followers, this feature is automatically turned on. If this applies to you, skip to the “Using the Facebook Audience Optimization Tool” section. If you have fewer than 5,000 followers, you will need to do the following to activate the feature:

Go to your page and click on “Settings” on the top right hand of the navigation bar.

Within General, turn on the feature.

Using the Facebook Audience Optimization Tool

A. Add a link in your post as you normally would.

B. Click on the “bull’s eye” icon at the bottom of the post area.

C. Define the interest tags for the post. Facebook will prioritize delivering your post to the newsfeeds of those who have indicated the same interest tag or have liked pages tagged with the interest tags you select. In this case, I chose “Marketing Automation” and “Startup Company” [Fig. 1]. I also specifically defined the audience by geography [Fig. 2].

Fig. 1: Preferred Audience

Fig. 2: Audience Restriction

With these listed features you get to know how far your post has gone to your targeted audience with breakdown of total reach by tag. It could also help you identify segments of your audience you might not otherwise have thought to engage and create more relevant posts for each segment.

Suggestions by Facebook on use of the Audience Optimization tool:

Facebook suggests starting broad and then narrowing to more specific audiences. It is however good that you avoid tags that are too broad for example ‘Entertainment”, “sports”, favoring subcategories instead.

You should not limit tags to topic within the post itself because it may be of interest to that audience.

You should tag organizations and brands that may overlap with the subject matter of your post, even if they aren’t directly mentioned.